Okay, I’ll admit it: the first part of that title is a tad cumbersome. I got tired of typing COUNTDOWN TO A CONTEST, PART {fill in Roman numeral here}. The contest deadline to which I was counting down has passed (how do people feel their entry process went, by the way?), and besides, much of what I’m discussing in this part of the series would apply — stop me if you have heard this before — equally well to refining contest entries and submissions to agencies.

I know, I know. Some day, I’m going to have to come up with more descriptive titles for my posts.

Let’s get back to courting the comic muse. Or, more accurately, to our discussion of how aspiring writers often think they are courting her, without actually winning her favor. Or so we must surmise, from the fact that such a high proportion of attempted humor leaves both Mehitabel, everybody’s favorite fictional veteran contest judge, and her niece Millicent, intrepid screener of manuscripts at a theoretical agency, with distinctly untickled funny bones. Further evidence might be gleaned from the startling frequency with which entries and submissions elicit spontaneous, uninhibited laughter with lines the writer did not think would pass anywhere near those aforementioned funny bones.

Ooh, nicely executed spit take, everybody. “Wha–?” would-be humorists across the English-speaking world cry, their eyes bugging out of their heads like cartoon characters (oh, you thought you were the first writer to use that simile?). “How can something intended to be unfunny provoke that response? I can understand a joke’s falling flat, but I hate the idea that Mehitabel and/or Millicent might be chuckling over my Great American Tragedy.”

Good question, eye-buggers. But didn’t the previous question answer it?

If the previous paragraph did not make you giggle, well, you are either delightfully innocent (and thus might want to avert your eyes from the next paragraph, in order to remain so), not a very detail-oriented reader (as Mehitabel and Millicent invariably are), or, perish the thought, the joke I just made was not very funny. Given the exceptionally high probability that all three are true, allow me to compound the mistake of having cracked not particularly wise by explaining why it should have been funny, as well as illustrative of my ongoing point. To render the narrative error even more representative of what M & M tend to see on the page, allow me to explain my failed joke as pedantically as possible.

You see, the would-be humorists asked how a piece of writing could provoke laughter if its author did think it was funny. I then said it was a good question — something I’m pointing out because I don’t have sufficient faith in the reader to believe s/he can remember what s/he has just read — but then turned that compliment on its head by addressing the imaginary questioners with a double entendre. That, for those of you new to the term, is when the comic value of a phrase arises from its meaning one thing literally, but also being subject to a sexualized interpretation. In this instance, eye-buggers could refer to those whose eyes protrude unusually far between their lashes, but it also — and herein lies the yuck factor — could imply that those same imaginary questioners are in the habit of performing a physically improbable sex act upon eyeballs in general. Get it? Get it? Compounding the humor: the sentence that followed raised the possibility that the phrasing in the previous sentence might have been unintentional — and thus likely to spark unintended laughter at the entry or submission stage. Har de har har har!

Hands up, those of you who thought my bad joke was funnier before I explained it. Keep those hands up if you found yourself wishing by a couple of lines into the subsequent explanation that I’d just accept that the joke hadn’t worked and move on.

Welcome to Mehitabel and Millicent’s world. They’re constantly treated to unfunny, marginally funny, and might-have-been-funny-after-a-couple-of-rewrites humor attempts. They are also, for their sins, frequently forced to read painful attempts to render an unamusing quip funny in retrospect. Over-explanation is one popular means — and, as we have just seen, it seldom works. Equally common:

Or having a character laugh in order to alert the reader that what’s just appeared on the page was intended to be humorous:

As the head bagger stomped away, Herman pictured a large brown bag descending upon him, scooping him up. Now trapped at the bottom, Ambrose would be helpless as a giant hand flung boxes of cereal and canned goods upon him, perhaps topped by a carton of eggs. He laughed at the mental image.

This, I am sorry to tell you, would cause Mehitabel to roll her bloodshot eyes. “Thanks prompting me to laugh,” she snorts, “because I couldn’t possibly have told that you meant this to be funny otherwise. I see you have also helpfully let me in on the secret that pictured referred to a mental image. Otherwise, I might have thought that the narrative had suddenly shifted from gritty slice-of-life fiction into magical realism.”

Let that be a lesson, would-be humorists: if a bit isn’t funny on the page, having a character find it amusing won’t make it more so. Also, as Mehitabel has just so kindly demonstrated for us, since readers cannot hear tone, sarcasm often does not come across well on the page. From which we may derive a subsidiary lesson: just because something generates a laugh when you say it out loud does not mean it will necessarily be similarly guffaw-inducing on the page.

Why did I put that in bold, you ask? Millicent and Mehitabel requested it; they’re tired of reading manuscripts out loud to try to figure out what on earth Herman thought was so darned funny.

Then, too, professional readers as a group tend not to like being told how to react to writing, period. Mehitabel has every right to feel irritated at being told that she should find what she has just read humorous. Self-review tends not to play well on the page, even if it is very subtle.

Oh, you don’t think what Herman’s creator did was self-review? M & M would regard it that way. They would also see the following fruitless authorial effort as reaction-solicitation. Any guesses why?

“The bookstore is closed for the night,” Gemma snapped, gesturing to the CLOSED sign on the door. “What are you two still doing here?”

“Oh, we’re just browsing,” Angelina said airily.

Bonnie laughed. “Yeah, we’re looking for a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit.”

Gemma looked puzzled. “Why would you need to be wearing ski masks for that?”

If you leapt to your feet, crying, “Bonnie’s laughter is intended to order Mehitabel to laugh, too,” you deserve a gold start for the day. It doesn’t render Angelina’s joke any funnier, does it? Since M & M do not, as a rule, enjoy being told how to evaluate the writing in front of them, they would have been more likely to find the quip amusing if it had appeared like so. While we’re at it, let’s excise those other professional reader-irkers, concept redundancy and having a character vaguely point to something in order to let the reader know it’s there.

Gemma fixed the closer one with her flashlight. “The bookstore is closed for the night. What are you two still doing here?”

“Oh, we’re just browsing,” Angelina said airily, smiling through her ski mask.

Bonnie aimed her rifle just to the right of Gemma’s head. “Yeah, we’re looking for a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say so right away?” Gemma felt under the cash register for her favorite throwing knife. “We’re always happy to move some Dickens.”

Better, isn’t it? It’s funnier because the narrative trusts the reader’s intelligence more. As opposed to, say, the ubiquitous practice of just telling the reader point-blank that something is funny:

Barbara flung her banana peel on the ground. Her snarky coworker did not see it, trod upon it, and slipped. It was hilarious.

In case I’m being too subtle here: very, very few contest entries are genuinely funny. Oh, many of them try to be, and some attempts at amusing actually would be chuckle-worthy if spoken out loud, but humor is a capricious mistress. In order to work on the page, how a writer chooses to frame the funny is every bit as important as the joke itself.

Yes, really. You may have written the best one-liner since Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire, but if it’s not set up correctly, it’s going to fall flat. And that, my friends, is going to come as a huge disappointment to a humor-loving Mehitabel or Millicent.

Why, you ask? A funny entry, or even a funny joke in an otherwise serious entry, feels like a gift to your garden-variety professional reader. A deliberately-provoked laugh from a judge can result in the reward of many presentation points, and often additional points in the voice category as well.

Notice that I specified a deliberately-provoked laugh. An unintentional laugh, what moviemakers call a bad laugh because it springs forth from the audience when the filmmakers do not want it to occur, will cost a contest entry points. And it should: a bad laugh can knock the reader right out of the scene.

We’ve all burst into bad laughter at movies, right? My personal favorite cropped up in the most recent remake of LITTLE WOMEN. It’s quite a good trick, too: provoking a bad laugh in a scene that’s not only arguably one of the best-known in children’s literature, as well as one in which the filmmakers remained very faithful to the original text, can’t have been easy.

I’m about to show you the moment in question, but first, let’s take a gander at how Louisa May Alcott presented it to her readers. The March girls have just learned that their father, a chaplain in a Civil War regiment, is dangerously ill. Their mother, not unnaturally, wishes to travel across many states to nurse him back to health, but the trip will be very expensive. Everybody’s favorite little woman, Jo the tomboy, is frantic to help. After having disappeared for most of the day, she returns home with a wad of cash, and her family, equally unnaturally, wants to know whence it came.

…she came walking in with a very queer expression of countenance, for there was a mixture of fun and fear, satisfaction and regret, in it, which puzzled the family as much as did the roll of bills she laid before her mother, saying, with a choke in her voice, “That’s my contribution toward making father comfortable and bringing him home!”

“My dear, where did you get it? Twenty-five dollars! Jo, I hope you haven’t done anything rash?”

“No, it’s mine honestly; I didn’t beg, borrow, or steal it. I earned it, and I don’t think you’ll blame me, for I only sold what was my own.”

As she spoke, Jo took off her bonnet, and a general outcry arose, for all her abundant hair was cut short.

“Your hair! Your beautiful hair!” “Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty.” “My dear girl, there was no need of this.” “She doesn’t look like my Jo any more, but I love her dearly for it!”

As everyone exclaimed, and Beth hugged the cropped head tenderly, Jo assumed an indifferent air, which did not deceive anyone a particle, and said, rumpling up the brown bush, and trying to look as if she liked it, “It doesn’t affect the fate of the nation, so don’t wail, Beth.”

Now, Mehitabel and Millicent might well quibble over whether expression of countenance is redundant (technically, it is) or the unidentified speakers, or the unfortunate choice to demonstrate simultaneous speech by tossing aside the one speaker per dialogue paragraph rule. I also cherish the hope that you are all shaking your heads over Aunt Louisa’s regrettable affection for run-on sentences.

But there’s nothing to provoke a bad laugh here, right? It’s a sweet, evocative YA moment: the teenage heroine can’t stand to feel helpless, so she chooses to make a personal sacrifice in order to help her family. That’s a good plot twist. And if Amy (we assume) telling her that she’s now ugly hurt her feelings — “Your one beauty!” is a remarkably nasty thing to say, but she has a point: Jo’s effectively rendered herself unmarriageable for the next year or two — that’s good relationship development. And if she cries about it later that night, that’s good character development.

Here’s that moment again, as it appeared in the film. Note how the focus of the scene has shifted, doubtless as a reflection of the fact that cutting one’s hair was not nearly as shocking to moviegoers in 1994 as it would have been to readers in 1868. My apologies about the commercial at the beginning; it was the only version I could find.

See the problem? As in most filmed versions of LITTLE WOMEN, the young lady playing Jo — here, the inestimable Winona Ryder — is physically the most attractive of the bunch. Not to fault her portrayal of Jo, but Ms. Ryder arguably possessed at that point in her career the kind of face that artists over the centuries have willingly mortgaged their souls in order to depict with anything that approached tolerable accuracy.

So, predictably enough, at “Your one beauty!” the theatre positively rocked with mirth — and so much so that the next few exchanges were completely inaudible. Thus what was one of the dramatic high points of the book was transformed into an occasion for bad laughter.

And yet, amazingly, the script chose to feature that particular bad laugh TWICE: once as live action, and once as a voice-over flashback. When I saw the film, the second time engendered widespread chuckling, as moviegoers had their own little flashbacks about how completely ridiculous that particular moment had been. Good times were had by all.

Just once, I would like to see a version of LITTLE WOMEN where the casting reflected the book. Jo March was plain (in the novel, Meg was the pretty one); her hair actually was her only point of physical beauty. Her sacrifice in cutting it off in order to sell it, therefore, was significantly greater than if she had been otherwise gorgeous. It also, in my opinion, made it substantially easier to identify with her. Jo’s not a fantasy: she’s a real girl, with real problems.

Which were not merely a reflection of Louisa May Alcott’s real problems, incidentally, as readers (and reviewers) have historically assumed. It’s a surprising misconception, given that she wrote about her own wartime experiences so extensively: Louisa was the one that went off to war, not her father; she served a nurse in a Union hospital.

Oh, and those fantastic stories all of the filmed versions of LITTLE WOMEN (and, to a lesser extent, the text) lead us to believe the author considered bad, harmful writing? Alcott apparently actually preferred them to her children’s writing. She wrote many pretty good romantic thrillers — and, like Jo, she supported her family with them. She even sent her sister May (the prototype for Amy) to art school with the proceeds.

Why, yes, that is a digression, now that you mention it. I just get so sick of the automatic presumption that anything a woman writes must necessarily be autobiographical. In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s later life, people apparently asked her all the time who she knew that had managed to bring a corpse back to life. Because it’s not as though a woman who had lost all but one of her children before the age of 5 could have imagined FRANKENSTEIN, right? It’s not as though she were the daughter of two famous novelists or anything.

But I digress. We were talking about comedy, not tragedy.

The question of how real life translates to the page is not irrelevant to humor, however. It can be genuinely difficult for a writer to tell what does and does not come across as funny on his own printed page, especially if the scene in question bears some relation to the author’s life. So if you write comedy, or even want to ascertain that a single quip in a manuscript you are planning to submit is funny, it’s a serious strategic mistake to have Mehitabel or Millicent be the first human being besides yourself to read it.

I heard that gasp — the Jo March fantasy of writing in secret, then triumphantly announcing to incredulous kith and kin that one is published, is almost as common as semi-autobiographical first novels. (With apologies to Madame Shelley.) But if you are trying to be funny, good feedback — especially the kind of impartial feedback you might get from someone who does not happen to love you — is crucial.

Why especially? Well, what is funny in real life is often not amusing on the page, at least not to someone who was not privy to the actual event. There’s a reason, after all, that “You had to be there, I guess,” is so commonly uttered by anecdotalists the world over: real-life funny often arises from mishaps, actions out of character, or events whose comic juxtapositions would be entirely lost upon a bystander who is not already intimately familiar with the players and their respective situations.

Thus the desirability of soliciting first readers who have not, say, given birth to you, held your hand why you were crying over a break-up, walked down the aisle of any sacred edifice with you while either of you was wearing white…or actually was present for any occasion you depict in a manuscript. Or heard you talk about those events second-hand. They harbor preconceived notions that color their reading. That makes it awfully hard for them to judge either the event or the writing by what’s on the page alone.

By definition, a contest judge (or, for that matter, any professional reader to whom you might hand an excerpt from a larger work) is a bystander with no prior associations with the situation described. That tends to render them both less likely to find writing funny and more likely to succumb to bad laughter.

Which is why, I suspect, so many aspiring writers try to make up for that impartiality by over-selling the humor — or by trying to justify it afterward. But let’s face it, nothing kills a joke faster on paper than the narrative’s scurrying to provide an explanation of why it’s funny after the action or bon mot has already passed under the reader’s eyes. To cite a fairly popular species of this particular misguided effort:

“Why, Monique, you’ve grown so thin!” Antonia exclaimed. “Have you found a monumentally successful new diet, or have you merely been deathly ill?”

It was both an attempt at humor and a sincere question. Yes, people often do lose weight when they suffer from a major illness. But in this time period — although, obviously, not today — people often spoke about weight loss as though it were a magic trick, a secret the successful dieter was sworn never to reveal.

Monique steadied herself on the banister. “Ill, you’ll be delighted to hear.”

Pretty clunky, isn’t it? The subsequent explanation sucks the life out of what could have been a mildly funny speech, had it been left alone. It also brings the energy of the scene — and the tone of the exchange — to a screeching halt for lines on end. Besides, if it were actually crucial to the quip that the reader know the information conveyed in that second paragraph (and I don’t think it is here), wouldn’t the text be far more likely to elicit a spontaneous laugh if the reader knew about it before Antonia said it?

Many, many writers combat this problem by including guffawing onlookers as the sort of laugh track we saw in action at the top of this post: whenever a joke appears in the dialogue, the reader is told that someone nearby laughs in response. Yes, one sees this tactic used in movies and on TV all the time — sitcoms film before live audiences or use laugh tracks for a reason — but it seldom translates well to the page.

I sense some of you still don’t believe me. Take a gander, please, at another ubiquitous type of attempt to engender hilarity.

“Hi, Mac,” the bartender said. “We haven’t seen you for a while.”

Mac flashed a brilliant smile, twirling one of his guns. “I’ve been busy. You know, with the ladies.”

Everyone within earshot burst into delighted laughter, slapping their thighs and jostling one another. One patron even fell off his barstool.

“Oh, Mac,” the can-can girl with the heart of gold purred, sidling up to him, “you’re so funny.”

No, lady, he isn’t — or at least, the writer hasn’t shown him being so. The humor may well lie in his tone, or Mac may have funny teeth, but the reader is left to fill in that blank for herself. Rather than investing the creativity and elbow grease in coming up with something funny for Mac to say, the writer here has indulged in a lazy narrative trick.

To an experienced professional reader, this shortcut detracts from the humor of the scene, rather than adds to it; the bigger the onlookers’ reaction, the less funny it seems. and not merely because the Greek chorus of laughter typically does not make the joke seem funnier. To a judge, agent, or editor who has been around the literary block a few times, the onlooker’s guffaw is a flag that the author has some significant doubts about whether the joke is actually funny.

Yes, really. It’s frequently a marker of discomfort, a peek behind the scenes into the writer’s mind, distracting from the story at hand. And once the reader suspects that the writer isn’t amused, it’s only a small step to the reader’s not being amused, either.

Before anyone asks: no, you cannot construct a joke so funny that it obviates all chance of this reaction. People who laugh at their own jokes — which is how this tactic comes across on the page, right? — are seldom as amusing as people who allow their audience to decide whether what they are saying is funny or not.

You can lead a judge to funny, but you can’t make her laugh. Humor is highly subjective.

That last bit may seem self-evident, but think about it with respect to contest judging: the things that make you (and/or your nearest and dearest) chortle with glee may not be a contest judge’s proverbial cup of tea. Just as it’s never wise to assume that those passing judgment on your writing share your sex, sexual preference, political beliefs, etc., it’s not a good idea to proceed on the assumption that they will share your sense of humor.

Attempting humor is riskier than writers tend to believe. Yes, pulling off a good joke is likely to win you disproportionate points for voice — as I said, a truly amusing narrative voice, or even a stellar one-liner, is awfully welcome toward the end of a long day’s reading ultra-serious prose — but just like Olympic gymnasts or high divers who attempt a super-difficult maneuver, the chances of failure are high.

Those of you that just clutched your stomachs know where I’m going with this, I take it: attempting to be funny and missing the mark will typically cost a manuscript more than being devoid of humor. It’s not an uncommon instant-rejection reason, if Millicent stumbles across it within the first couple of pages of a submission. And if a contest entry tries to be funny and fails — especially if the dead-on-arrival joke is in the exposition, rather than the dialogue — most Mehitabels will fault the voice, dismissing it (sometimes unfairly) as not being fully developed enough to have a sense of its impact upon the reader.

Please take that risk with caution — and run the results past an impartial reader or two to ascertain every single one of those jokes will fly. It usually doesn’t take more than a couple of defunct ducks in a manuscript to move it into the not-for-us pile. If you’re not absolutely positive that it’s funny, it should go, pronto.

While I’m on the subject of purely subjective criteria, I’d like to talk about a little something that I like to call the Ta da! factor. It’s hard to define precisely, it’s when a manuscript exudes the sort of mercurial charisma that Elinor Glyn (author of that Edwardian scandal, the romance THREE WEEKS) dubbed It when it occurs in human beings. (Thus Clara Bow, the It Girl, an Elinor Glyn discovery. She also dug up a minor charmer named Rudolf Valentino.)

As Madame Glyn argued, we may not be able to define what It is, but many of us seem to drool over those who have It, when we encounter them in real life. But just telling a reader that is not going to make anyone drool.

Like It, the Ta da! factor makes a manuscript shine, practically demanding that the judge give the entry high marks. In fact — although you are not hearing this from me — a healthy dose of the Ta da! factor might even prompt a judge to fudge a little in the other categories, so as to assure the entry a point total that will launch it into the finalist round.

To achieve the Ta da! factor — well, if I could tell you that, I would chuck the blogging business entirely and establish myself as the world’s most expensive writing guru, wouldn’t I? I do know that mere professionalism is not enough. Yes, all of the technical aspects of the work need to be right, as well as the execution. The writing style needs to be strong and distinct, and it helps a lot if the story is compelling.

Beyond that, it’s a little hard to say how precisely the Ta da! factor gives a manuscript its sheen, just as it’s difficult to pin down just what makes a great first line of a book so great. Perhaps it’s rhythm, and a certain facility for telling detail.

But most of us who love literature know it when we see it, don’t we? Here’s a definite example of the Ta da! factor in action:

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and four chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train.

That’s the opening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Truman Capote’s masterpiece — which, speaking of odd casting, somebody really ought to make into a movie someday; the Audrey Hepburn version bears only a passing resemblance to it. (The original novella concerns a friendship between a straight woman and gay man in their late teens; the movie is about a love story between a straight man and a woman in, if you look at George Peppard charitably, their late thirties. Oh, and the endings are quite different.)

But just look at the use of language here. You could sing this opening; it’s positively bursting with the Ta da! factor.

Perhaps, too, a certain sense of showmanship is required. Bask in this one:

He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. There was no tallying the gifts of Charvet handkerchiefs, art moderne ash-trays, monogrammed dressing-gowns, gold key-chains, and cigarette-cases of thin wood, inlaid with views of Parisian comfort stations, that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for with the money of unwitting husbands, which is acceptable any place in the world.

That, my friends, is the opening to Dorothy Parker’s short story DUSK BEFORE FIREWORKS — and let me tell you, if a short story like that fell onto my desk as a contest judge, I would not only shower it with the highest possible marks (yes, even though I do not agree with all of Ms. Parker’s punctuation choices in this excerpt); I would nag the category chair unmercifully about pushing it into the finalist round.

Not only that: I would go to the awards ceremony, cheer if it won, and make a point of meeting the author. I might even introduce the author to my agent. Because, my friends, it exudes the aura of the Ta da! factor as distinctly as a bowl of excellent clam chowder exudes aroma.

I mention this, not to cow you with examples of writing by extremely talented writers, but to fill you with hope, in the midst of this long discourse on all the technical ways you can gain or lose points in the contest judging process. Ultimately, talent does supersede almost every other consideration, as long as the work is professionally presented.

This is not to say that you should not go to great lengths to avoid making the point-costing mistakes I have pointed out over the course of this series — you should, because genuinely talented writers’ work is knocked out of competition (and into agents’ rejection piles) all the time for technical reasons.

When talent is properly presented, though, the results are magical.

“One of the miracles of talent,” Mme. de Sta?l tells us, “is the ability to knock your readers out of their own egoism.” (Another favorite writer of mine; every woman who writes should read her brilliant novel CORINNE at some point. She wrote it in 1807, but apart from the travelogue sections, it’s still fresh as piping-hot cinnamon rolls today.) The Ta da! factor does just that, grabs the reader’s attention and simply insists upon this book’s being read, right now.

Under the sway of all of the publishing fads continually buffeting us, it’s all too easy for writers to forget what power really good writing has. Publishing fads, like fashions in beauty, come and go. Talent doesn’t.

Just as so many of the actors held up as exemplars of beauty now would not have been considered especially attractive in, say, the Italian Renaissance, or even a hundred years ago, I believe that many of the books published today will not be considered essential reading a hundred years from now. But the work of some authors — Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Mme. de Sta?l, to name just a few — has something about it that elevates it above the passing fad, just as there are some actors who, it is perfectly obvious to us all, would have been considered absolutely lovely in any period of human history.

“Oh, Jo! Your one beauty!” notwithstanding.

See how right I was earlier in this post? If I hadn’t set that up, it would have fallen completely flat. Indeed, to a reader who had not read the first half of this post, the last paragraph would merely have been confusing.

The lengths to which I will go to make a point, eh?

I was serious about the Ta da! factor, though. Keep your chins up, my friends, through all the hard work of perfecting your manuscripts and contest entries; you’re toiling in a noble vineyard. Real talent is not, after all, necessarily measured in the short term.

Just ask Aunt Louisa; she’d been writing — yes, and publishing across a broad array of genres — for years before she hit the big time. Keep up the good work!

Sorry that I have not posted for a few days — earlier this week, I was saddened, as so many readers were, to hear of the death of the great Ray Bradbury. I’ve been listening for days to folks praise his novels, deservedly so, and his television work, which was — well, in respect to his memory, I’ll just say that it was less consistent. Yet strain my ears as I might, I’ve heard barely any retrospective celebration of what is arguably one of the best American short story collections ever gathered between covers, I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC.

Perhaps I am prejudiced: this collection contains one of my all-time favorite short stories in the English language, a little charmer called Tomorrow’s Child. The premise, introduced by Mr. B. himself above, is unparalleled, or perhaps I should say intriguingly paralleled: ordinary parents produce a child normal for a different dimension. Metaphorically, I think it’s one of the most sensitive, nuanced depictions of the problems of love, societal expectations, and fitting in ever written.

Not that your garden-variety writer would have any life experience with those types of problems. Nothing trajects a person more decidedly toward a literary adulthood than a perfectly happy childhood and stunningly untroubled adolescent, right?

Those of you who have even the faintest interest in how fantasy narratives can be handled, should run, not walk, to plunge into that lovely story. And while I’m shooing you toward Mr. B’s writing and we all have childhood on the brain, if you know a young person that you suspect might want to grow up to be a writer, or just want to clap your eyes on a darned fine example of evocative showing, not telling, you might want to pause in your headlong scurrying to pick up a copy of THE HALLOWEEN TREE.

Was that far-away moan of wind a group of slightly tardy banshees mourning the gentleman’s passing, or are some of you surprised that my brief eulogy did not sound precisely like the literally thousands of virtually identical tributes that have been floating around the airwaves over the past few days? “But Anne,” those glued to electronic devices point out, “you’re digressing. Furthermore, you’re breaking the rules. In order to fit in with this officially-designated period of public mourning, you’re supposed to be talking about FAHRENHEIT 451. Everyone else is.”

Why, yes, they are. Practically to the exclusion of anything else. Am I alone in feeling that is not necessarily the most meaningful way to remember the rich, diverse career of an incredibly prolific author?

Yes, yes, I know: those of us devoted to science fiction and fantasy are supposed to be falling all over ourselves with gratitude that a practitioner of a once-reviled (and still often looked down upon in high literary circles) genre is receiving any public recognition at all, but honestly, the man was a pioneer in two of ‘em. Doesn’t he deserve recognition for more than just one or two of his works?

Or is the other horrifying possibility coming to pass? Is it me, or do 97% of the people talking about him on the airwaves seem to be completely unaware that he wrote both science fiction and fantasy? Or, indeed, that there’s any distinction between the two? And if television news types do not make that fairly fundamental distinction, what other important distinctions are they not making?

What hellish new world is this? Does gravity even operate here?

And a forest of hands sprouts in the ether, bringing my tirade on respecting our literary elders to a screeching halt. “Um, Anne?” a few of you offer timidly. “I’ve been referring to my manuscript Science Fiction/Fantasy in casual conversation for years, because that’s how the bookshelf that holds similar books is labeled in my local bookstore. Yet your satirical scorn in the previous paragraph leads me to suspect that my old nemesis, Millicent the agency screener, might think I have conflated a couple of well-established book categories.”

Don’t feel bad if you fell into this particular trap — Millicent does in fact see it all the time. And for good reason: the distinction between the two is often as nebulously-defined as literary fiction; ask any six agents that handle that kind of books, and you’ll hear at least six different definitions. Perhaps seven or eight.

So I like to fall back on the classic definitions: science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable. Oh, and while I’m at it, literary fiction is closely-observed, character-driven storytelling via unusual or experimental narrative devices, assuming a well-read (and generally college-educated) audience.

Well, that solves three of the great cosmic mysteries. I guess my work is done for the day. Before I go, and so I won’t leave you hanging, here is the second part of that oddly-cast Ray Bradbury Theatre production of Tomorrow’s Child.

Just kidding; I know that some of you would like a bit more clarification of those categories. Traditionally, science fiction contains strong technological elements — thus the name — but not all science fiction presupposes advances in gadgets. Quite a lot of science fiction involves exploration of the improbable in the natural world: The world doesn’t actually work like that, but what if it did? Take the classics by H.G. Wells or Jules Verne: by making the improbable (time travel, a foodstuff that creates giant creatures, a journey to the center of the earth, etc.) possible, they were able to take those incredible premises and write about their implications in a largely realistic manner.

In a fantasy, however, the premise can, and often does, involve something that couldn’t possibly happen in the world as we know it, so there’s no need to adhere to the rules of the normal universe. The aforementioned parents finding themselves cuddling a blue pyramid, for instance. A child’s noticing that something remarkably similar to the man paying the bills in his household growing in a vat in the garage. Dorothy and Toto’s being swept up by a tornado and whisked off to Oz. A vampire and a werewolf compete for a mortal teen’s affections.

Oh, come on: you think vampires in the real world sparkle? Where’s your notion of probability?

I see half of you rolling your eyes at the very notion of having to commit to a book category, but just think about how reductive most of the eulogies we’ve been hearing about Mr. Bradbury have been: science fiction writer, period.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, accompanied by a passing reference to his having written a few Twilight Zone episodes. That’s far more limited than a Millicent working at an SF/fantasy-representing agency would have been in describing his writing.

Let’s face an unpleasant fact that I think most writers would change if our world were occupying a fantasy: we live in a reductive-minded period of history. One of the perennial annoyances of literacy lies in just how often one has to hear people clearly unfamiliar with one’s favorite authors’ work rhapsodize about them after they have died — and in how frequently one has that sinking feeling that the writing is being devalued in the process. As fond as anyone who might actually have read FAHRENHEIT 451 might be of it, it’s hard not to become slightly less so after the third or fourth newscaster mangles the plot. Or after the fifteenth or sixteenth celebrity gushes about it as though it were the only thing Ray Bradbury ever wrote.

Oh, I’m pretty sure I can tell you why we’ve been hearing about such a narrow swathe of his work: even though the man was no chicken, not everyone seemed to have a eulogy ready to hand. The television (and a surprising amount of the web) response seemed to be entirely informed by a quick trip to IMBb, rather than, say, his website. Or, if the would-be eulogizers did visit his website, they don’t seem to have read beyond the first three novels listed in his bio (FAHRENHEIT 451, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN).

Don’t get me wrong: all of these are fine pieces of writing. I would be the last person on earth to dissuade a reader from falling into a story after having been grabbed like this:

“Hey, the Illustrated Man!”

A calliope screamed, and Mr. William Philippus Phelps stood, arms folded, high on the summer-night platform, a crowd unto himself.

He was an entire civilization.

Now, I’m no fan of opening a narrative with a quote from an unidentified speaker (neither are most Millicents, incidentally), but that’s some lovely writing. But we haven’t been hearing Mr. B’s fiction quoted very much over the last few days, have we?

That’s the problem with telling about a writer’s talents, rather than showcasing his work: it’s not an adequate substitute. And in this case, I have to say that I also find it just a little snobbish. Short stories are writing, too — so isn’t it a trifle odd that the public mourning for one of the finest short story writers this country has ever produced should have included so few references to his short stories?

It seems a trifle, well, ungrateful, literarily speaking. (Especially since Morrow brought out such an excellent collection of a hundred of them a few years back. Which anyone interested in how to put a short story together might conceivably want to flip through. I’m just saying.)

A sense of continuity would be more fitting. So would a sense of history.

To be fair, though, my feeling that Ray Bradbury was insufficiently appreciated does predate his death by a couple of decades. Now that perfectly respectable adults read science fiction and fantasy as openly and shamelessly as folks read literary fiction in public, it’s hard to remember just how difficult it was for the science fiction and fantasy authors of Bradbury’s generation to get their writing taken seriously as writing. The prevailing wisdom used to be that only adolescent boys habitually read either — and that they would grow out of the taste.

Talk about fantasy, eh? Yet it had a very tangible real-world effect: for many years, newspapers and magazines seldom reviewed adult science fiction or fantasy novels at all.

That meant, among other things, that until fairly recently, science fiction and fantasy writers seldom had the luxury of assuming, as their more literarily-acceptable brethren and sistern did, that their publishing houses and book reviewers would do all of the necessary work of alerting potential readers about their books. They started going to conventions long before even writers in other genres did; they would travel far and wide to meet their readers. And, like Bradbury, they tended to have to do a heck of a lot of writing in order to make a living at it.

Okay, so that last bit hasn’t changed all that much.

All of which might perhaps explain something that should not have happened in a well-organized world: in the mid-1990s, I was walking between stores on the second floor of a large mall in a North American city that shall remain nameless when I spotted Mr. Bradbury sitting all by himself in front of a chain bookstore on the lower floor. Just waiting behind a card table and a large stack of books, ready to sign one for anyone that wanted it, without so much as an index card Scotch-taped to the front of the table to let people know who he was. No one seemed to notice him.

Seems almost unimaginable, doesn’t it, given how the media’s been talking about him for the last few days? Naturally, I trotted down to the bookstore to say hello and give him my mother’s regards; after some prompting and the purchase of several books, a store employee scared up a chair for me. And in the almost two hours we sat there, not a single passerby stopped to buy a book. Heck, no one even paused to shake his hand. And no one, but no one, dropped by to say, as we’ve been hearing the media say all week, “Hey, Mr. B., thanks for FAHRENHEIT 451. It changed my conception of (fill in the reader’s personal mental revolution here).”

Tell me, do you think one of the nation’s most beloved author’s being ignored like that is a better example of the improbable made possible, or the impossible made probable?

So can you really blame me if, each time I heard one of those doubtless heartfelt praises of FAHRENHEIT 451 or THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, and of them alone, I found myself recalling that Thomas Seward poem: “Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead/Through which the living Homer begged his bread”? Or if, the next time I heard an author complain about the necessity of promoting her book, I treated to her a quite possibly over-the-top diatribe about how she should be proud to participate in a long-standing genre tradition?

Aren’t you glad that I held off from posting?

I’m eager to get back to the business at hand now, however — which was, if you can recall as far back as a couple of weeks ago, an ongoing, in-depth discussion of what does and does not tend to work in a literary contest entry. Not too many of you have been commenting upon this series, I have noticed; hard to know whether that’s due to relatively few of you planning to enter a writing contest anytime soon or to the undeniable fact that smartphones and iPads have transformed many formerly-commenting blog readers into non-interacting column-perusers.

Speaking of how times have and have not changed. I honestly do like to hear from my readers.

Because so much of what tends to trip up the average contest entry can also annoy Millicent the agency screener, I shall be pressing ahead with this series for the nonce. To render it more broadly useful, however, I shall veer away from that subject dear to Mehitabel the veteran contest judge’s heart — how to avoid technical violations that might get your entry disqualified — and steer us into the murkier waters of ways in which writing often loses points for larger reasons.

That’s right, people: we’re going to be talking about style.

And the masses shout for joy. I can’t say as I blame you: before we paused for our recent Series Series of guest blogs, I had been urging those of you who like to enter contests to run through your entries with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, searching not only for spelling, grammar, and formatting errors, but tiny rule violations as well. Somewhere in the ether, writers’ subconsciouses were wailing, “But I thought the point of a literary contest was to judge the quality of the writing, not how well I could follow directions or if I know how to format a manuscript correctly.”

I sympathize with that cri de coeur. Truly, I do. But it is my sad duty to remind potential contest entrants — and potential submitters to agencies and publishing houses, while I’m at it — that to a professional reader’s eyes, incorrect formatting, odd typefaces, and other unexpected manuscript peculiarities are darned distracting. Reading past them is sort of like trying to enjoy a ballet while a drill team performs maneuvers with large flags in the orchestra pit.

To continue our running theme: while it is possible for a determined Mehitabel or Millicent to concentrate upon the artistic values of the performance, it’s not particularly probable, even with the best will in the world. Revising your good writing to minimize those distractions is essentially showing that drill team the door, so the ballet may proceed undisturbed. (And so the orchestra will have somewhere to sit.)

Yes, it’s a rather unpleasant process, especially on a tight deadline — but hey, welcome to the life of a professional writer. We’re constantly having to revise our work on deadlines. It’s grumpy-making. And at the risk of depressing you, for most authors, that grumpiness never really goes away.

Don’t believe me? If you want proof, try having a civil discussion about grammar with an author who is proofing his galleys. Caged tigers ten minutes before feeding time are friendlier.

So I like to think of pre-contest (and pre-submission) revision as the farm team games for the major leagues of writing. No one hits fifteen home runs in a row the first time she picks up a baseball bat, right? The pros put in a heck of a lot of batting practice before they get good at it.

In that spirit, I have an observation– and what I’m about to say next may startle some of you, so go ahead and grab onto the nearest heavy object, to brace yourself: the less a writer enjoys revision, the more important the pre-entry once-over is.

And not merely for the sake of the entry — although, since virtually no writer’s first draft is so polished that it couldn’t use a spot of revision, it is a genuinely good idea to make a sweep for common problems, over and above a standard spell-check. The ability to look at one’s own work critically is a vital skill for a professional writer.

Why? Because even if the Archangel Gabriel himself dropped a perfectly-formatted manuscript by Shakespeare, proofread by Mme. de Sta?l, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen, and Confucius, and with ready-made jacket blurbs from Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and Sophocles onto the desk of the most literature-hungry agent in the land, I guarantee you that the agent will ask for at least one revision.

And that’s before the editor gets her hands on it. Or anyone even begins to consider the problems of attracting one’s admiring public to a book signing.

This comes as a shock to most writers who have just landed an agent or sold a first book — but their reaction is a minor tremor compared to the major earthquake that writers who have not learned to read their work critically experience. Writers who have never gained the skill of accepting feedback as part of the job of writing, rather than a personal attack, tend not only to be knocked off their feet by their first encounters with professional feedback, but to feel as if a tidal wave hit them as well.

This sight always makes me feel just a bit sad, partially because there’s so little sympathy in the industry for this particular stripe of culture shock. As I’ve mentioned many times before, professional readers don’t typically pull their punches: if they’re critiquing your work, it’s because they think you have talent; if you didn’t, they would not take the time. So learning to take critique gracefully, as well as rejection, is a valued skill in a writer.

If you’d like to know just how strongly your garden-variety agent prefers writers capable of self-revision after feedback to ones that have meltdowns about it, drop in at that bar that’s never more than a hundred yards from the registration desk at any given conference, wait until the third round is in hand, and ask the nearest agent to tell you her favorite client horror story. 99.9% of the time, that story will involve an author whose response to feedback was negative.

Brace yourself, though, for every other agent and editor in the bar to have a story like this to tell. You may be in for a long night.

I can feel some of you shifting uncomfortably in your chairs. “Um, Anne?” I hear a few voices murmur, “I thought we were going to be moving on to style. Have you merely digressed, or are you telling us all of this just to pass along general information about working in the biz? Or — and I have a feeling this is what you’re doing — are you trying to brace us for the shock of the next set of standards you’d like us to apply to our entries before sending them out?”

Set your minds at ease, my darlings: I’ve been doing both. I’m about to encourage you to add another valuable wrench to your writer’s tool bag. The next common contest entry problem is going to require you to muster all of your concentration to weed out, but believe me, once you learn to spot it, you’ll wonder how you ever self-edited before.

I’m referring, of course, to skipping logical steps in arguments or plots, assuming that the reader will simply fill in the gaps for herself. This pervasive problem affects both coherence and continuity — and can consequently cost an entry a ton of points.

One really does have to see this phenomenon in action to understand why. I can do no better than to refer my faithful readers to Nietzsche’s THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA as an illustration. (Take that, literary snobs that don’t believe well-educated people read science fiction or fantasy.) Try following this little gem from Part II. I dare you:

Behold, this is the hole of the tarantula. So you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web; touch it, hat it tremble!

There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sits black on your back; and I also know what sits in your soul. Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge.

Thus I speak to you in a parable — you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word justice. For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.

Hands up, anyone who didn’t say, “Huh?” at least once while reading that.

That’s not the only confusing passage in the book, either. Following the narrative of Nietzsche’s book is like watching a mountain goat leap from crag to crag on a blasted mountainside; the goat may be able to get from one promontory to another with no trouble, but those of us tagging behind actually have to walk up and down the intervening gullies. The connective logic between one point and the next is frequently far from clear, or even downright wacko — and in a book that proposes that the writer and reader both might be logically superior to other people, that’s a serious coherence problem.

Would you believe that this type of argumentation actually isn’t all that uncommon in contest entries? Particularly in nonfiction entries on political or social topics — where, as in this case, the author can make the fatal mistake of assuming that Mehitabel will share his political and/or social beliefs. Even a judge who didn’t feel that the metaphor was forced and tautological (Nietzsche likes neither tarantulas nor egalitarians, so they must perforce be similar enough to have the same motivations?) might well dismiss the argument as prejudiced (he’s presuming that tarantulas are all mean, whereas I have known some very sweet ones not at all inclined to bite philosophers).

What would most likely get a contest judge to run screaming from this passage, though, is not the overworked metaphor, but the skipped logical steps. Let’s take a look at why this phenomenon is so disturbing in print. An argument with a logical leap in it appears from the reader’s perspective to run rather like this:

1. Socrates was a man.

2. Socrates was wise.

3. Therefore, men who want to be wise should not wear socks.

Clearly, there is some plank of the argument missing here. In order to prove Proposition 3, the writer would first have to show that

(a) Socrates did not wear socks (I have no idea if this is true; the statue above is no help on the subject. But hey, Greece is a warm country, so it’s entirely possible he didn’t.)

(b) non-sock wearing had some tangible and demonstrable effect upon his mental processes that cannot be explained by other contributing factors, such as years of study or having a yen for conversation with smart people, and

(c) the bare ankle experiment’s success was not dependent upon some exogenous variable, such as the fact that socks would have looked really stupid worn with a toga.

It would make sense, too, to establish that Socrates is a proper role model for modern men to emulate, as opposed to scruffy old sock-wearing moral thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps the book could even include a compare-and-contrast of the intellectual achievements of famous sock-wearing individuals versus those of the air-blessed ankles. By the end of such a well-argued disquisition, the reader might well become converted to the author’s premise, and cast his footwear from him forever with a cry of grateful liberation.

And half of you are once again rolling your eyes. “Talk about the improbable made possible!” you hoot. “This could not possibly be common in contest entries or submissions to agencies!”

You obviously have never been a judge in a literary contest. (Or advised an undergraduate thesis in political philosophy, for that matter. I could tell you tales.)

Admittedly, Nietzsche allegedly wrote his book in a three-day frenzy while confined to an insane asylum due to a — avert your eyes, children — particularly virulent case of syphilis, so perhaps it is not fair to expect world-class coherence from him. The average literary contest entrant, however, does not have so good an excuse, and should not expect the judges to cut him any slack in the logic department.

If Millicent ever has the opportunity to write connective logic??? in one of your margins, your presentation score is sunk. Ditto if your pages are lurking under Millicent’s pen.

So I must advise: make sure you’re filling in the relevant gullies. Read over your entry for coherence.

Should I be concerned about those of you that have sunk to the floor, moaning? “I could take the discussion of death,” the overpowered gasp, “as well as the sober contemplation of just how little support living authors, even famous ones, often receive for their literary efforts. I even kept my chin from trembling while you were telling me it was my responsibility as a serious writer to get used to submitting my work for unblinking critique. But now you’re telling me that I might not even be able to tell without re-reading my work if my narration is coherent? I feel myself slipping into a stupor.”

Oh, dear. What can I do to cheer you up?

Oh, I know: Nietzsche did one thing in THUS SPAKE ZARTHUSTRA that might help him win back style points from Mehitabel — include genuinely funny lines. It’s actually quite an amusing book, coherence problems aside, and not only because of them.

On the remote chance that I’m being too subtle here: very, very few contest entries are genuinely funny — and you wouldn’t believe how much even a single good laugh from an entry will improve the average Millicent’s opinion of it. I’ve seen it add enough points to raise a borderline entry into the finalist round, in fact.

I’m not talking about just fleeting smile funny, mind you, but stop reading long enough to laugh aloud funny. But that’s a subject for another day. For now, I leave you to ponder the joys and benefits of logical coherence. For practice, perhaps you might like to examine how I brought this little essay through short, comprehensible consecutive steps from a discussion of writerly hypersensitivity to a contemplation of comedy.

Hey, I’m a professional; it took years of practice to perfect that trick.

It also, in case you had been wondering, took me years of contest judging and manuscript editing to appreciate Millicent’s frustration with the ubiquity of the borrowed-from-short-stories plotting practice of not leaving the reader with a well-defined, dramatically-satisfying ending. Not sure why? Well, let me ask those of you that watched the first two parts of Tomorrow’s Child: didn’t you want to know how it ended?

So will both Millicent and Mehitabel. It’s a natural human urge to want to see a storyline dramatically resolved. So here you go.

Thank you for everything, Mr. B; you will be missed. Far off in the literary heavens, I know you will be keeping up the good work.

And no, you didn’t misread the blurb on the cover: it’s that Elton John. The little bird that flies around telling people things told me that he liked the original release of Joel’s memoir so much that he volunteered to blurb the second edition.

If you prefer not to receive your news from passing waterfowl, you can read a fuller account of this remarkable publication story in Joel’s earlier guest post on book promotion. While we’re on the subject of guest posts, Joel also charmed the Author! Author! community with an exceedingly useful guest post on obtaining permission to use song lyrics in your books, should any of you be contemplating setting foot on that particular Yellow Brick Road. (Or were you under the impression that memoirs and novels could quote songs willy-nilly? Au contraire, mon fr?re.)

Mssr. John was not the only one to fall in love with Joel’s deeply human, devastatingly honest, and often howlingly funny voice. I already knew how amusing and insightful Joel was before the book came out, yet as the neighbors that did not move away instantly at the sight can attest, certain sections of this book made me rush into the street, tap-dancing with glee. Sparklers may or may not have been involved.

Was I that hard up at the time for some humorous memoir? you ask, bemused. No, thank you, I write, read, and edit funny memoir all the time. What separated Joel’s first book from, well, everything else was not merely how consistently diverting it was — not an easy trick, with a life fully and well lived — but how unblinkingly truthful it was.

Yes, those of you rolling your eyes? “Oh, come on, Anne,” the memoir-jaded snort. “The whole point of memoir is that it’s true, isn’t it?”

Ah, but there’s true in the sense of having actually occurred — and true that sends shivers through your membranes because it shows you life in a way you had not seen it on a page before. There’s true that reads plausibly — and true that makes the reader gasp, “Wow, my therapist does not know me as well as I now know this memoirist.” And, as any memoir editor worth her salt and/or pepper could tell you, there’s true that’s well-written — and there’s true that’s so prettily phrased that one’s socks, shoes, and pinky rings get blown off.

Or, at the very least, that causes one to go running out into the street, looking for an innocent bystander to whom to read a particularly striking passage. (My neighborhood used to be so quiet before I met Joel.)

I’m certainly not the only professional reader that felt this way when his bombshell of a first memoir came out, incidentally. Some other bon mots from those that know about such things:

In a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit . . . [Derfner is] the next No?l Coward.?Out.com

What’s that you say? You’d like me to stop telling you the man can write and let him get on with showing you same? Reasonable enough. Let’s start with the publisher’s blurb for Swish:

Joel Derfner is gayer than you.

Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him — he’ll tell you himself).

In Swish, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to meet men — many, many men — or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones–but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets–is a hero destined for legend.

Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers–gay, straight, and in between.

Here again, we smack head-first into that bugbear of memoirists everywhere, the distinction between true and true. All of these statements are factually accurate about the book, but what struck me most about Joel’s memoir, what set my membranes humming, my feet tap-dancing, and my neighbors scurrying into the street to see why I was shouting is not mentioned in this blurb.

What’s missing, in my view? The fact — oh, okay, my opinion — that this is one of the best memoirs ever written on how darned hard it is to be a smart, sensitive human being in a world that habitually rewards neither.

And that, my friends, is what has made this book among the most tattered on my memoir shelf. Occasionally, life will throw a meandering curveball that knocks one of Joel’s beautifully-phrased insights out of my at this point stuffed-to-bursting memory vaults, sending me rushing right back to the text.

Oh, and in the spirit of this series, I should add: the guy’s paid his dues as a writer, and then some. He’s done it with wit, humor, and perseverance in the face of some pretty long odds. All of which has not only garnered my completely ungrudging respect (and you of all people know how high my threshold for grudge-free respect is), but a feeling that somewhere up there in the Muses’ palace, the Ladies in Charge have already reserved some serious shelf space for Joel’s subsequent literary achievements.

Ah, but there’s the rub, isn’t it? After a debut memoir like that, what precisely does one do for an encore?

I asked Joel that question, and rather than fleeing with the flailing arms and piercing screams such a seemingly flippant but subversively difficult question deserves, he gave it the alternately serious and humorous literary attention that has caused me to come to think of him as the memoirist little brother the Muses should have seen to it that I had. (With all requisite apologies to the nonfiction author big brother with whom they actually provided me — oh, you thought my parents would have put up with offspring that didn’t write?)

Here, then, is his response, and I have to say, I wish I had read it before I first sat down to write a memoir. In my checkered experience, it’s not only true — it’s true. Take it away, Joel!

Wait, that wasn’t Joel. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never seen him and Judy Garland in a room together. I’ve never seen Superman and Joel in a room together either, though, so…hey, wait a minute…

Here, then, is Joel as his usual charming self — and his usual wise self vis-?-vis the difficult path of the memoirists. Five, six, seven, eight!

I’m about to sign a contract for the publication of my second real book, whose working title is Lawfully Wedded Husband: How I Tried to Destroy America With my Gay Marriage.

Yes! I thought when I read this. It’s a good thing this reviewer has a distinctive name, because now I can look him up online and stalk him and make him fall in love with me and then we can be happy together for the rest of our lives.

Part of what had allowed me so to bounce back and forth in Swish was that I was incredibly, incredibly depressed. I hadn’t been quite on the verge of suicide while writing the book, but I had certainly been within spitting distance, and I’d found it easy somehow to reach inside, touch a raw, exposed nerve, and twist it until something funny came out and I started crying.

I began Swish in 2005, and it was published in 2008. At some point in 2009, my agent said to me, “Joel, I need another book from you.” (I realize this sounds incredibly glamorous, but really I’d just begged her for a meeting because all I’d been able to afford for months was Taco Bell and I was hoping she would at least take me to TGIFridays or something.) (She didn’t.) So I said, “Okay, no problem, I’ll start working on another book.” My boyfriend had just proposed to me, and the issue of marriage equality seemed topical enough to be worth writing about, so I went home, turned my computer on, and started typing.

After an hour or so, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t interesting at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought a couple candy bars, came back, ate them both, and started over again.

A couple hours later, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t true at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought five candy bars, came back, ate them all, and spent the rest of the evening staring morosely at the television, because I had a very serious problem:

I was no longer unhappy enough.

In the years between 2005 and 2009, I had made a great many positive changes in my life, including but not limited to getting a therapist, going on massive doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and moving in with my boyfriend, and all those nerves that had been so raw and exposed before now had a modicum of protective covering. My two-candy-bar attempt had been uninteresting because I hadn’t been twisting any nerves; my five-candy-bar attempt had been dishonest because I was only pretending to twist nerves that weren’t in fact twistable, at least not in the way to which I was accustomed in writing.

My muse had disappeared.

Please don’t think for a second that I’m saying you have to be unhappy to write well. It wasn’t my writing that had suffered, you see; it was my subject matter.

I came quickly to think of this as the Tolstoy problem. Even if you haven’t read Anna Karenina you’re probably familiar with its famous opening sentence, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”?

It was easy to write with deep sadness and wild humor when that was all I had, and I had them in my own way, and could convey them with idiosyncratic verve.

But what was I going to write now? “I cooked my boyfriend dinner. It was yummy. Then we watched Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and went to sleep. I love him.” Who would want to read that for even a page, much less an entire book? I certainly wouldn’t.

But if I faked it–”I cooked spaghetti for my boyfriend and accidentally used only one clove of garlic instead of two in the spaghetti sauce and he didn’t say anything about it so now I’m lying awake staring at my ceiling trying to figure out whether he didn’t notice or he noticed but didn’t want to say anything about it because it was the last straw and he’s going to break up with me tomorrow” — well, that could work for a paragraph or two, maybe even a few pages, but it wasn’t true, and I knew there was no way I could sustain it for an entire book.

So what was I going to do?

This question paralyzed me for about a year. Occasionally I would sit down and start writing something, trying to be both interesting and honest, fail, and then stop thinking about it for another month or two, because not thinking about it allowed me to avoid discovering I could no longer write.

The problem was that not thinking about it was great as a strategy to avoid discovering I could no longer write, but as a strategy to write it left something to be desired. If the only way to avoid confronting my inability to write was refusing to write, then the whole thing sort of turned in on itself until everything collapsed and at some point the bodega was going to run out of candy bars.

So I figured, okay, why don’t I ease into this by writing about the issue itself first, not about my own experiences? If you’re quoting legal statutes you can hardly be expected to be wildly funny and deeply sad.

So I started with a sort of analytical/philosophical/whateverical chapter, and went from there. And as I wrote, I tried to find ways to touch and twist indirectly those nerves to which I no longer had easy access.

I think I’ve succeeded, to some degree. I think that when this book is at its best I’m able to explore things about feeling alone even in a relationship, about what a relationship can’t give you, about the difference between expectation and reality.

I’m sorry not to have a better or clearer way to talk about how I was about to get started again or what those indirect ways are. I think it’s because I’m still in the middle of the story–the story of me writing this book, I mean, not the story the book is telling–and I don’t have the perspective I need to understand what I’m doing differently.

I’m still very afraid that this book isn’t as good as my last one, because its sadness isn’t as deep nor its humor as wild. One reason I went with this particular publisher, though, was that the editor said he liked this book more than Swish, which was incredibly heartening, because it allowed me to hope that whatever I’ve replaced twisting raw nerves with might be equally valuable, or even more valuable–to hope that I’ve found a way, all unawares, to skirt the Tolstoy problem.

And if that’s the case, then, if I’m lucky enough to be invited to post again on this blog in a few years, maybe I can tell you how I did it.

Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and Gay Haiku author Joel Derfner is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard. A year after he graduated, his thesis on the Abkhaz language was shown to be completely wrong, as the word he had been translating as “who” turned out to be not a noun but a verb. Realizing that linguistics was not his m?tier, he moved to New York to get an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts.

Musicals for which he has written the scores have been produced in London, New York, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he joined Cheer New York, New York’s gay and lesbian cheerleading squad, but eventually he had to leave because he was too depressed. In desperation, he started knitting and teaching aerobics, though not at the same time. He hopes to come to a bad end.

It’s Christmas Day, campers, but my tree has gone dark: the electricity has been out for the last two hours. The local authorities claim that gigantic boom we all heard around noon resulted from a frantic windstorm’s having taken out a transformer. A less literary-minded analyst might take this story at face value. You can’t fool me, though. This is obviously Phase I of the Grinch’s most recent plan to steal Christmas.

Either that, or the Great Celestial Plotmaster(s) have been reading a lot of classic mystery lately. The day has all the hallmarks of the genre: while stoplight at the top of the hill’s being on the blink (or, rather, uncharacteristically not being on the blink) is admittedly the kind of thoughtfully-selected, pragmatic detail that makes a fictional world spring to life on the page, my brunch guests’ finding themselves plunged into darkness — or as close to darkness as a deep gray Seattle afternoon will permit — must hardly have come as a surprise to those familiar with the genre. I’ll bet you saw it coming the proverbial mile away. What’s next, a cat leaping out of nowhere to startle us at a suspenseful moment?

I mean, really: all of the characters are gathered in one place, and the lights go out? Even the Agatha Christie-impaired around the table immediately began making nervous jokes about which one of us was about to meet a grisly fate.

That’s why, in case any of you have been wondering since last spring’s foray into editorial pet peeves and how to avoid them, I tend to urge savvy revisers not only to scan their manuscripts for places where summary statements (such as All the lights went out could be productively replaced with character- or situation-revealing details (In the middle of the soup course, the chandelier suddenly gave up on emitting light. Even the stoplight at the corner had ceased blinking annoyingly in Montel’s peripheral vision. The butler fumbled in the sideboard for matches.), but for opportunities to surprise and delight the reader with unexpected specifics (In the middle of the soup course — a clear, sherry-laced leek broth with a jaunty dollop of crème fraîche floating gaily on top — the dusty chandelier suddenly gave up on its losing battle to shed light on the table. Even the stoplight at the corner had ceased blinking annoyingly in Montel’s peripheral vision. Startled, he knocked his shrimp fork onto a passing cat.).

My, but that was a long sentence. Somewhere in the literary stratosphere, the late Henry James must be chortling over his holiday goose, muttering to Edith Wharton, “They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

“Too few semicolons for my taste,” Edith replies. “And watch your elbow: if you knock the figgy pudding over, you are sure to set the tablecloth on fire.”

My point, should any of you by some remote chance have lost sight of it in the midst of all that frenetic activity, is that while every type of book — and certainly every genre of fiction — has its own conventions, tropes, and characterization expectations, word for word, a writer is going to get substantially more expressive mileage out of a creative telling deal than one that any inveterate reader of that book category could guess. Or even, if it’s a common enough element, add subconsciously to the scene if it does not appear on the page.

Oh, when you read that second description of the lights going out, you didn’t murmur, “I bet the butler did it,” before your eyes passed the parenthesis at the end of the example?

Yes, Millicent the agency screener is encouraged — indeed, is often explicitly trained — to be on the look-out for manuscripts that read like, well, books in their chosen categories, and yes, each book category, particularly each genre fiction category, has its own recognized and recognizable plot twists, plot lines, stock characters, and, yes, types of details. Because agents specialize in particular types of book, as well as certain types of voices — a fact well worth bearing in mind when selecting which agents to query — it does tend to be to a writer’s advantage at submission time if the manuscript fulfills category-specific expectations. (That’s as true in a query’s descriptive paragraph as in a submission’s first few pages, by the way: if the text doesn’t sound as though it would fit comfortably within the manuscript’s chosen book category, it will usually be rejected.)

Let’s face it, though, the line between making your text read like it belongs shelved with others like it and like a cliché fest can sometimes be pretty thin. Many an aspiring writer believes, mistakenly, that producing a pale replica of a famous author’s writing is a better way to win friends and influence people at an agency than to come up with something more original. Or, even more mistakenly, does not become familiar enough with what’s currently being published in that book category to be aware what conventions would now strike someone who deals with those manuscripts for a living as passé.

To put it another way: when was the last time you read a mystery in which the butler actually did it?

The result, unfortunately, is that our poor Millicent tends to see the same types of specific — as well as the same plot twists, character types, and even phrasing — over and over and over again. When you consider the sheer volume of stories within the same category any agent successful in selling such books receives in any given year, that’s hardly astonishing.

The trouble is, most submitters remain woefully in the dark (and not because the lights went out) about how such elements are likely to be received at an agency. Good writing in a particular book category is good writing, right?

Sheer repetition has made Millicent believe otherwise, alas — but honestly, it’s hard to blame her for feeling that way. What might strike Writer A as requisite for that genre is frequently precisely what Writer B considers an homage to a classic and what Writer C will decide to drop in as a humorous riff on a cliché. And that’s not even counting what Writers D-F will honestly believe is original, but is actually a subconscious lifting of material or phrasing from an admired book.

“Oh, come on,” Millicent mutters, scalding her lip on that too-hot latte she forgot in her annoyance she had set aside to cool. “Does this writer honestly think that someone who reads as much as I do can possibly read an opening line like Yesterday, I fantasized that I returned to Ottawa without Daphne du Maurier’s REBECCA springing to mind? Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again is arguably the most famous first line in the genre!”

Wondering why I am bringing all of this up in the midst of a series on querying? Well, several reasons. First, I wasn’t going to post today at all, but as my guests went home when the soup got cold, I had a bit of extra time on my hands. I also had a charged-up laptop, as it happens, so clearly, this is kismet.

Especially as I had a holiday-themed anecdote I had been itching to recycle, anyway. I could have worked it into a series of queries, but hey, it’s a holiday — I thought everyone might enjoy a little break from our two solid months of query consideration. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing that those of you devoted enough to your writing to be checking in at Author! Author! today might be more seriously interested in a discussion of craft than your garden-variety casual Internet browser.

Either that, or you might be trying to avoid your nearest and dearest. I’m happy to help you do that, too.

So gather close to the Yule log, campers, and let me spin my tale. As you read, try to think like Millicent: does the narrative contain enough specifics to provide all of the characterization needed? Does it occasionally stumble into the realm of cliché? While you’re at it, why not embrace the chance to embrace the Author! Author! tradition of trying to figure out what editorial tweaks could improve the story?

Curly the camel, Moe the donkey, and, to mix Christmas traditions as thoroughly as possible, Donner the reindeer have been on tour together, strip mall manger scene after strip mall manger scene, since they were just small, furry refugees from the petting zoo where they were born. Despite their years of entertainment experience, my local nursery — plants, not animals — plasters the six-foot wire fence around their enclosure with warnings to wreath-buying patrons about keeping their fingers, gloves, hat pom-poms, scarf tassels, and bundled-up infants away from Curly’s long reach, Moe’s strong teeth, and Donner’s oddly-shaped antlers.

They also, somewhat less emphatically, erect a sign informing dog-owners that crèche livestock are not, to put it mildly, best friends with man’s best friend. Since dogs cannot, unfortunately, read and many leash-tugging owners apparently do not, poor Curly frequently thrusts himself between some yapping visitor and his hoofed friends. Nearby, nursery personnel visibly restrain themselves from shouting, “Hey, can’t you read?”

On the whole, though, human behavior seemed to leave the trio unfazed. Scores of children flung hay at them, bellowing, “Hey, Reindeer!” — or “Hey, Dog,” from those who had never seen a miniature donkey before or were confused by the ambient barking. The trio just stood there, blinking slowly, eyes glazed. Most of the time, the parents would intervene before the children grew too frustrated with their passivity and rushed the pens.

One small pink-clad screamer simply would not leave the animals alone, however. She kicked at the metal fencing, screaming words I was a surprised a kindergartener would be able to use correctly in a sentence, or, indeed, incorporate into her everyday vocabulary without getting expelled. When she picked up a rock, I wandered over to the fence to distract her with a hastily-constructed fairy tale about our barnyard friends. And camels.

Almost immediately, a bulbous man in shorts and a t-shirt materialized by my side. Despite ambient cold that left our breath visible, his exposed arms and legs were not even goose-bumped. “Come over here,” he barked at the little girl, dragging her along the fence until they were directly in front of Curly.

Was he going to make her apologize to the camel? Curly did not seem to be expecting it, but perhaps his furry friends would appreciate the gesture.

Releasing the quivering child, the man — whose clothing, I noticed, was emblazoned with advertisements for a local band and Nike, respectively, not the nursery — reached up and over the chain-link fence, snapping his fingers. Placidly, Curly dipped his head, extending his hyper-mobile lips toward the hand.

Curious to hear what happened next, aren’t you? That’s a good indicator that a scene is paced well. See how selecting those details carefully, as well as not over-burdening the text with explanations, can increase suspense while simultaneously moving the plot along?

So why, I ask you, would our old pal Millicent, have stopped reading part-way through paragraph #3? Because, I assure you, most would have: one of her most notorious pet peeves has reared its ugly head here.

If you pointed out that the narration switched tenses between the second and third paragraphs, congratulations! Paragraphs Nos. 1 and 2 are in the present tense; paragraph #3 is in the past.

Submissions and contest entries do that all the time; so do, believe it or not, descriptive paragraphs in query letters. Sometimes, they even switch back to the original tense later in the text, or vacillate from sentence to sentence.

Already, I can spot some raised hands out there. “But Anne,” adherents of variable tenses point out, and with some reason, “Paragraphs #1 and #2 describe ongoing conditions, while paragraph #3 on focuses upon one-time events. Doesn’t that mean that the tense choices here are appropriate, or at least defensible?”

Good question, lovers of the present tense. Professional readers — agents, editors, contest judges, writing teachers, etc. — are trained to spot redundancies in a manuscript. They’re also taught to leap upon inconsistencies.

In other words, Millicent is likely to assume that the change of tense is not the result of well thought-out authorial choice, but simply a mistake that did not get caught in the proofreading process — or, if this were a descriptive paragraph in a query, the after-effects of an incomplete merger of two different versions, one in the present tense and one in the past.

Why might that make her stop reading altogether? Like other commonly-made errors, the tense inconsistency may well jar her out of the flow of the story. Next!

You habitual tense-switchers are not particularly happy with that answer, are you? “Okay, so she’s detail-oriented, but this isn’t a writing mistake; this is a stylistic choice. So why would Millicent be annoyed by it?”

On its face, your logic is pretty sound, tense-switchers: it would indeed be possible, within the context of a civil conversation between author and reader, to justify the tense choices in the example above. A writer might ostensibly win an argument with, say, a writing teacher, critique group, or even an editor about keeping the switch in the text. But that doesn’t mean it would be a good idea to submit pages with tense inconsistencies to Millicent — or to her aunt Mehitabel the contest judge, for that matter.

Why, you ask? Long-time readers of this blog, chant it with me now: because the writer is seldom present when an agency screener, editorial assistant, or contest judge encounters his manuscript for the first time. Successful manuscripts, queries, synopses, and contest entries are thus those that do not require additional verbal explanation.

So even if the writer is technically correct, if a tense switch seems unjustified to Millicent — if it appears to be, say, an incomplete revision between a manuscript originally in the present tense and a subsequent draft in the past, or vice-versa — that’s usually the ball game. So why risk it? Especially when, as in this case, making the tense consistent does not detract at all from either the meaning or the voice of the section. Lookee:

Curly the camel, Moe the donkey, and, to mix Christmas traditions as thoroughly as possible, Donner the reindeer had been on tour together, strip mall manger scene after strip mall manger scene, since they were just small, furry refugees from the petting zoo where they were born. Despite their years of entertainment experience, my local nursery — plants, not animals — plastered the six-foot wire fence around their enclosure with warnings to wreath-buying patrons about keeping their fingers, gloves, hat pom-poms, scarf tassels, and bundled-up infants away from Curly’s long reach, Moe’s strong teeth, and Donner’s oddly-shaped antlers.

They also, somewhat less emphatically, erected a sign informing dog-owners that crèche livestock are not, to put it mildly, best friends with man’s best friend. Since dogs cannot, unfortunately, read and many leash-tugging owners apparently would not, poor Curly frequently thrust himself between some yapping visitor and his hoofed friends. Nearby, nursery personnel visibly restrained themselves from shouting, “Hey, can’t you read?”

On the whole, though, human behavior seemed to leave the trio unfazed. Scores of children flung hay at them, bellowing, “Hey, Reindeer!” — or “Hey, Dog,” from those who had never seen a miniature donkey before or were confused by the ambient barking. The trio just stood there, blinking slowly, eyes glazed. Most of the time, the parents would intervene before the children grew too frustrated with their passivity and rushed the pens.

That’s as painless a revision as you’re ever likely to encounter, folks, by see how big a difference it makes to the text? All it requires is a good proofreading eye and a willingness to view the story from Millicent’s perspective, not the writer’s. (The latter, after all, is already familiar with the storyline.) And need I even add that this variety of inconsistency is easiest to catch if one reads one’s submission or contest entry IN HARD COPY, IN ITS ENTIRETY, and OUT LOUD?

I thought not. Let’s move on with the story, to see if we can catch any other Millicent-displeasers.

Delicately, politely, as if he were extracting an egg from beneath a mother hen, Curly took the man’s fingers into his gargantuan mouth. The hand did not budge. The camel paused meditatively for a few seconds, tasting, then sucked the hand into his mouth up to the elbow, dragging the man up to his tiptoes.

Instinctively, I took a step toward the child. If the object lesson about the dangers of violating animals’ personal space was about to go horribly awry, the least I could do was shield her from seeing the bloody denouement.

The man waved me back with his free hand. “See, Tanya?” he told the saucer-eyed girl. “They like people. If you treat them nicely, they’ll treat you nicely.”

“That’s right, sweetie,” a stringy-haired woman called from the nearby wreath display. “Be nice to the animals, and they’ll never hurt you.”

“You just have to learn what they like.” A helpful bystander kicked a tall crate toward the man’s feet, so he could follow his arm skyward. “Camels love sucking on things.”

Mentally, I began taking notes, in preparation for my inevitable testimony in a court of law. “I think she’s got the point. Maybe it’s time to back off now?”

Okay, what’s the problem this time? Hint: it’s even harder to catch than the last.

No? What about all of that redundancy in the dialogue?

That made some of you do a double-take, didn’t it? “But Anne,” several exclaim, “that’s how people talk in real life! You’re not gearing up to tell us that Millicent finds realistic dialogue annoying, are you?”

Um, sort of. At least the parts of real-life speech that are redundant. Or not germane to what’s going on. Or just plain boring.

Which is to say, as any close listener to everyday speech would happily tell you, most of it.

Oh, how often writers forget that real-life dialogue generally does not reproduce well on the page! If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a writer say, “But s/he really said that!” or “But that’s what people really sound like!” I would buy my own Caribbean island and send my entire readers on free writing retreats.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “isn’t that pretty self-evident? Just as absolutely faithful recreations of real-life events often don’t translate well into fiction, neither does most dialogue. Am I missing an additional nuance here?”

Perhaps one: aspiring writers are also apt to forget that real-life dialogue is seldom character-revealing — and thus reproducing it in a manuscript will often not convey as much about a character as we sometimes expect. Take, for instance, the oh-so-common writerly habit of placing the speeches of an annoying co-worker, relative, ex-lover, nasty dental receptionist, etc. into fictional mouth of a minor novel character as a passive-aggressive form of revenge.

Come on, every writer’s at least thought about it. To a professional reader, the very plausibility of this type dialogue often labels it as lifted from real life:

“Oh, wait a minute, Sarah.” Pausing in mid-gossip, Theresa picked up the overturned plastic cup before anyone else could step on it, placing it neatly on the dining hall checker’s desk.

Dina the checker glared at it as if it was covered in baboon’s spit. “Don’t you dare leave your trash on my desk. Do you think I have nothing to do but clean up your messes?”

“It was on the floor,” Theresa stammered awkwardly.

“Don’t you give me your excuses.” Dina grew large in her seat, like a bullfrog about to emit a great big ribbet. “You walk that right over to the trash can. Now, missy.”

“I thought you had dropped it.”

“Go!”

“I’ll save you a seat,” Sarah offered, embarrassed.

Inwardly seething and repenting of her Good Samaritanism, Theresa obediently gave up her place in the block-long lunch line in order to take the walk of shame to the garbage receptacles on the far end of the dining hall. How quickly a good mood could evaporate!

Tell me: what about this scene would tip off Millicent that this really happened, and that Dina is a character, if not from Christmas Past, at least ripped from the writer’s actual experience? And why would her being able to tell this be a liability? Why, in fact, would Millicent be surprised if Dina never showed later in the book any side other than the touchy one displayed here — or, indeed, if she never appeared again?

Actually, that was a set of trick questions. The answer to each part is the same: because the narrative doesn’t provide enough motivation for the intensity of Dina’s response. Fairly clearly, the writer doesn’t think that any such explanation is necessary.

That’s usually an indication that the writer has a fully-formed mental image (negative, in this case) of the villain in question — something that Millicent, by definition, would not walk into the scene possessing. Nor would any other reader who was neither there when the incident occurred nor had heard the author complain vociferously about it.

In other words, what we have here is a rather subtle manifestation of the telling, rather than showing phenomenon. Because the writer experienced this exchange as nasty because Dina was nasty, she has assumed that the reader will perceive it that way as well. But without more character development for Dina — or indeed, some indication of whether this kind of insistence was typical for her — the reader isn’t really getting enough information to draw that conclusion.

Or any other, for that matter. It’s just an anecdote. Yet most self-editing writers, especially those who happen to be writing memoir, wouldn’t notice this narrative lack. Any guesses why?

If you immediately shouted that it was due to the fact that his memory of Dina the real person is so strong, help yourself to four peppermint cookies from the holiday table. In the writer’s mind, her character is so well established that he can just write about her, rather than helping the reader get to know her.

The other tip-off that this was a real exchange is that Theresa is presented as a completely innocent victim of an unprovoked attack. The pure villain vs. completely blameless protagonist is a dead giveaway that dear self is concerned.

And yes, I WAS darned annoyed when Dina — in real life, a very nice woman named Ellen who happened to be having a spectacularly bad day — misinterpreted my act of good citizenship. If I crave well-deserved vindication from the total strangers who might conceivably read this story, however, it’s incumbent upon me to do quite a bit more character development. Not to mention integrating the incident into the storyline well enough that it’s actually interesting to read.

Of course, we want to be true-to-life in our dialogue: as Virginia Woolf tells us, “fiction must stick to the facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction.” But let’s not forget that in order to maintain a reader’s interest, a book has to have entertainment value, too — and that however amusing a verbal tic might be in person, repetition is often annoying in on the page.

This is especially true when a character is tired, angry, or in pain, I notice: all of a sudden, the dialogue sounds as though all of the characters are trapped in one of those interminable Samuel Beckett plays where the people are doomed to move immense piles of sand from one end of the stage to the other with teaspoons. See if this dialogue sounds familiar, theatre-goers:

A: “Oh. You’re home.”

B: (nursing the thumb the elephant trod upon in the last scene) “Yeah.”

A: “Have a nice day?”

B: “Um-hm.”

A: “I was cleaning out the attic today, and I came across that picnic blanket we used when we went out to Goat’s Rock Beach to scatter Father’s ashes. How it rained that day, and then the sun broke out as if Father and God had joined forces to drag the clouds aside to smile upon our picnic.”

B: “Yeah. “

A: “Ham sound good for dinner?”

B: “Yeah.”

A good third of the dialogue Millicent sees runs approximately like this, I tremble to report. Understand now why she might become just a tad touchy at the sight of dialogue that provides neither character development nor moves the plot along?

As a general rule of thumb — sore or otherwise — I like to flag any piece of dialogue that contains more than one use of yeah, really, yes, no, uh-huh, or, often, um. Almost invariably, these are an indication that the dialogue could either be tightened considerably or needs to be pepped up.

Similarly, anyway and however in dialogue are pretty reliable flares, indicating that the speaker has gotten off-topic and is trying to regain his point — thus warning the manuscript reviser that perhaps this dialogue could be tightened so that it stays ON point.

My fictional characters tend to be chatty (dialogue is action, right?), and I was once taken to task for it by a fairly well-known author of short stories. She had just managed to crank out her first novella — 48 pages typeset, so possibly 70 in standard manuscript format — so perhaps unsurprisingly, she found my style a trifle generous with words.

“Only show the dialogue that is absolutely necessary,” she advised me, “and is character-revealing.”

Hard to argue with that, eh? Yet, like most writers receiving critical feedback, I fought it at first. Since the dialogue in my advisor’s published works has seldom, if ever, strayed beyond three lines, regardless of situation or character, I was not particularly inclined to heed this advice — have you noticed how often it’s true that established writers with little or no teaching background spout aphorisms that all boil down to write as I do? — but I have to say, it has been useful in editing, both for others’ work and my own.

I can even derive an axiom of my own from it: if a person said it in real life, think twice before including it. If it isn’t either inherently interesting, plot-advancing, or character-revealing, does it really need to be there?

One more insight, then I’ll let you get back to your relatives: you’ve been having just a little trouble paying attention to my arguments, haven’t you? I’m betting that some substantial part of your mind has been distracted, wondering what happened to the arm in the camel’s mouth.

Let’s be honest, folks: that’s precisely what most writers who use this trick are trying to do. Professional readers are wise to it by now.

Remember, part of being a good storyteller involves knowing when to relieve the suspense — and frankly, in the case of my camel story, Alfred Hitchcock himself would have chosen to do so by now. Ahem:

“Give me a boost,” the man asked calmly, but his eyes were beaming panic over his daughter’s head. Curly’s lips were exploring the first few inches of his t-shirt sleeve.

Since his arm appeared to be on the verge of being ripped off at the shoulder, the crate-kicker and I hastily complied. With his uneaten hand, he began tickling the camel’s lips, rubbing the gums as if he were a mammalian dentist. Curly face elongated, as though he were going to sneeze. A loud pop, a slurp, and the man’s arm returned to the land of the living.

He strutted his way down from the crate. “See?” he told the girl. “If you know what you’re doing, they won’t hurt you.”

“Yes, Daddy,” she whispered, staring aghast at his friction-reddened arm, manifestly resolving never to have anything whatsoever to do with an animal larger than herself again.

The moral, if I may venture one: just because something seems like a good idea at first blush doesn’t mean that it’s worth stubbornly adhering to it. One of the keys to successful self-editing is flexibility.

That, and keeping any parts of your body involved in typing out of animals’ mouths. Happy holidays, everybody, and keep up the good work!